by Robert Drewe
Eric’s more exotic experiments have been less successful than they would have been 500 kilometres north. (His man-gosteens, Chinese raisins and ice-cream beans were a disaster.) Nonetheless, he boasts about his coffee being the southernmost coffee in the world, and claims that this extremity of latitude and ground temperature gives it less caffeine than Brazilian, Kenyan, Colombian or New Guinean beans. He says in these health-conscious times this is a good marketing ploy. I admire his optimism. You certainly don’t feel jumpy after drinking Eric’s coffee. But if murder’s on your mind, I guess that’s a good thing.
A cane fire was burning down on the patchwork quilt of sugarcane flats, and as we drank our coffee we watched the smoke spiralling straight up into the sky like a water spout. In the blue haze there was no smoke drift in any direction, no clouds, no hawks or swifts high in the sky, no breeze to rustle the leaves in Eric’s plantations, no diversion to determine a change of topic. Within three or four minutes the flames had died and the smoke had vanished but the bitter subject of murder still hung in the air.
Eric said, ‘I wouldn’t want any palaver like in the movies. No big discussion about the whys and wherefores. I’d just like the bastard to know he was going to cark it.’
I’ll admit that when Eric makes a cup of coffee from his own roasted beans it tastes better than when I do. One day I’ll master the subtleties of his beans and make an acceptable pot. Eventually I said, ‘You’re kidding, of course.’
‘You reckon?’ He sighed and shook the dregs of his cup into the bougainvillea. Then he stretched, flexed his arms and rolled his shoulders around like a weary old heavyweight boxer.
You get a reasonable impression of a person when you’re designing their website. In the preparation beforehand their vanities and the attributes they want to stress on the World Wide Web tend to throw into sharp relief those things they want glossed over. Personality defects. Professional lapses. Missing years in the curriculum vitae. The fact that their coffee lacks oomph and they want to kill someone.
Considering Eric in the context of first-degree murder, the coffee grower as would-be killer, he was thickset, long-armed, monobrowed and physically threatening. You could believe him capable of killing someone, with his bare hands if necessary. But viewed merely as an organic farmer with a broken heart, he came across that solemn windless morning, as a heavy sad-eyed fellow who believed marriage worked on the honour system, too.
‘At the very least I’d like Dolphin Boy to suffer something disfiguring,’ he said. ‘Apart from the ordinary busted nose and knocked-out teeth. Something that’d put her off him.’
By her, he was referring to Jeannie, his wife of nineteen years, who’d recently begun what she announced was ‘a spiritual journey’ with a man with only one name, like Madonna and Pink and Bono. The boyfriend’s chosen name was Sargasso, like the fabled seaweedy sea, graveyard of ships and birthplace of eels. He was a painter of frangipanis and hibiscuses and lurid sunsets and rainbows arching into the ocean. But Sargasso’s big money-spinner was dolphins: dolphins at dawn, dolphins at dusk, dolphins surfing the point break, and dolphins spiralling up towards vivid cartoon rainbows that curled over a benign sea. All up and down the east coast you’d see his distinctive dolphin paintings displayed in beach boutiques and cafes, on the walls of motel rooms and dentists and real estate agents. Dolphins sold. I reckon a dolphin could get elected to parliament in some of those towns.
When she departed, Jeannie had announced, ‘I’m heartily sick of the smell of coffee.’ Apart from coffee in all its varieties and blends, her new quest also disdained alcohol, meat, dairy products, newspapers and any books without an Eastern spiritual basis. I’d seen Sargasso around the district for years: a loose-limbed, lean, perpetually tanned type who displayed a bare torso long past summer and encouraged his abundant wavy hair in the style of Charles II. The fluid, flirting, drawstring-trousers-and-no-underwear sort, first on the floor when the music starts, last to get off, hips like a lizard, who arouses general male animosity the moment he steps out his front door. Women love him.
Suddenly Eric pointed towards the coastline, beyond those coffee and macadamia rows he’d planted and trimmed as neatly as a Bali tourist’s hair braids. ‘The love shack,’ he said, grimly. On the crest of the hill stood a lone stone house with a Bangalow palm on either side: Sargasso’s cottage. Its white-painted tin roof stood out from the lantana-covered escarpment and hazy sky. As the present object of attention it seemed to be preening in its own personal sunrays. Purple and white Tibetan prayer flags hung motionless outside, and Jeannie’s distinctive yellow Volvo station wagon was nudged in between them, nuzzling the flagpoles. My own imagination was working overtime, so Eric’s mind must have been going haywire. He wiped a hand across his eyes and swore vigorously. ‘I could do the bastard with one hand behind my back,’ he said.
It was two nights later, after the usual Friday evening pub session, that Eric drove over the hill, shouldered past the prayer flags, burst through the door of the love shack and caught his wife and Sargasso together. He stood there in the doorway, the day’s red dirt still on his work boots, and stared at them. They stared back. They were painting pictures of frangipanis and drinking tea.
On the table in front of the painters were three saucers, one each of floating white, yellow and pink frangipani blossoms, like a religious offering, and the flowers’ sweet bruised smell filled the cottage. As Eric told me later, ‘It’s impossible to raise a finger against someone drinking tea.’ He’d suddenly felt foolish standing on an unfamiliar threshold that smelled of flowers, in front of his estranged wife. But not as stupid as if he’d swung a punch at a still-life frangipani painter.
Niche farmers need to have their wits about them. Depending on the state of the market and trends in food, and making allowances for extreme weather, pests and disease, to survive they have to move fast from one crop, one fruit, one stock animal, to another. When we next had the opportunity for a personal conversation (I don’t like to pry, and anyway the public bar on Friday night is the last place for meaningful talk), Eric was sitting on his veranda chewing a chicken leg and fretting about his nut.
‘The nut’s a big worry,’ he said. I should mention that around these parts, nuts are nut singular. As in, ‘Do you grow nut?’ Most nut is macadamia, but it doesn’t matter which kind – macadamias, pecans, walnuts, Brazil, almonds – or if you’ve got 10 000 fully laden trees; they’re all nut. Like with wild animals in Africa, you use the singular or appear hopelessly naive. When in Kenya it’s advisable to say, ‘Look at those zebra and giraffe!’ even if there are 200 of them galloping past. Being chased by five lion. The same up here with nut.
Eric said, ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ Just as the banana market had dropped again and he’d ploughed his ladyfingers under, and turned that particular hillside over to another 500 macadamias, there was a sudden twelve per cent fall in nut. He wasn’t the only farmer affected. Before global macadamia prices began looking shaky, this whole region swung over to nut. Eric sounded mournfully wise now. ‘You want the history of nut? It used to be just the city farmers needing a tax break. And lawyers and doctors wanting a hobby farm without much labour attached. Then suddenly the nut became highly profitable. America, Asia – everyone wanted our nut. The big boys, the corporations, moved in. Now just about every old cow paddock and orchard is totally nut.’
Fortunately Eric wasn’t completely nut. He still had his organic coffee – chemical-free, not genetically modified, gentle on the stomach and blood pressure. He had his mangoes, too, and dwarf avocados and knotty-looking tangelos – and he’d stuck with Cavendish bananas, the long ones. But the decline of the nut coincided with some heavy personal blows. Last summer he’d burnt his hand in a coffee-roasting accident. Next thing his old mother died of Alzheimer’s down in Sydney and, being of unsound mind, left him out of her will. To top it off, Jeannie announced she was embarking on her ‘personal journey’. Not much travel involved on that trip, just a 300-m
etre drive over the hill to a white-roofed stone cottage.
In Eric’s mind, all his troubles came together in the permanently nut-brown figure of Sargasso the dolphin painter; the wavy-haired poseur who’d named himself after a sea-weedy sea that was the graveyard of ships and the birthplace of eels. It was nothing to do with me, but I found myself disliking him, too.
Eric’s a basic type of man. For months he stamped around the place raging at anything that reminded him, even vaguely, of the enemy. Everything from marine mammals to yoga was the subject of his wrath. Of course violent reprisals were still contemplated against Sargasso, at the very least the rearrangement of his House-of-Stuart-meets-the-rainforest features. But as the days passed, reason prevailed, and instead Eric lapsed into melancholy and Margaret River cabernet. A lonely year limped along, the time passing in anxious nut reflection and review. Once twelve months had gone, however, as if by some telepathic signal, those female friends who hadn’t sided with Jeannie’s journey began matchmaking on his behalf.
Eric was intrigued at first, even a little excited. Until he met the match-ups. Without exception, his female friends chose for him capable, financially independent country women with ethical histories, no addictions and minimal emotional baggage. ‘Decent ladies, all of them,’ he explained. ‘Heads on straight, imaginative kitchen skills, adept at keeping the books or whipping up a bouillabaisse. But the sort I might choose if I was looking for an aunt rather than a girlfriend.’
However, here we were drinking beer and nibbling drumsticks on Eric’s veranda, at the first party since the marriage split, on hand to meet a woman he’d chosen himself for a romantic relationship. ‘This is Desiree,’ he announced, somewhat shyly, waving an organic chicken leg as she drifted towards us. It must be said that Desiree was attractive in an ageless way. She was wearing a pink caftan that tipped the floor, and bare feet with a couple of rings on her toes, and her hand felt boneless and cool as she insisted on reading the lines in our palms. Then she inquired after everyone’s star sign.
I was staggered. Although she was seductively willowy and smelled like freesias, she seemed to represent everything he’d come to detest. And Eric did look faintly embarrassed. Overriding the astrology chatter, he declared, loudly and distractedly, ‘I’m confident the nut will come back.’ He gestured down towards his macadamias lined up in their dark military ranks. ‘It’ll be back by Christmas.’
Desiree wagged an admonishing finger. She padded up to him and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Nuts. Nuts. Nuts. He’s such a Taurean!’
After a few months Desiree moved in with Eric and, as far as I could tell, life at The Coastal Coffee Company (and Callahan Plantations and Callahan’s Rainforest Fruits) was settled and rosy. Whenever I crossed paths with Eric he wore a faintly bemused smile and I could only imagine that Desiree was good for him. Then our region was beset by weeks of unusually wild weather, marked by fierce winds and extremes of temperature. Frosts covered the valleys night and day. Five-metre waves pounded the coast and the rivers turned red with mud. Eric was one person, though, who didn’t need to rely on the latest Severe Storm Warning from the Bureau of Meteorology. He knew the weather was going to turn nasty when Doug Anthony descended from the rafters and slumped on top of the television set.
Doug was a two-metre carpet python, named after the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, who used to be Eric’s local member of parliament or, as he referred to him, ‘my lord of the manor’. Doug Anthony had long since left the political arena but Eric always called his resident pythons after him as a mark of respect.
In the vibrations of the power lines, Doug Anthony could anticipate by several hours the first hints of the cyclonic wind that would soon be whistling through the eaves. Long before the first tremors began in the roof, Doug Anthony, unnerved and cross, sought the ground-floor warmth and security of the television – at least until the storm broke and the power blacked out, or he slid off the TV set. (He was a big boy; there was a fair amount of tail and belly overlap.) Then he slithered off disconsolately towards refuge in the linen cupboard.
‘Doug looks exhausted,’ Eric told me, over the usual sample cup of coffee on his veranda. ‘He needs his winter sleep but he’s not getting enough.’ Nor was Eric, it turned out. Until Doug returned to the rafters – out of sight, out of mind – Desiree had moved out of home.
After some animated discussion, in which Eric pointed out that a resident python was necessary on a macadamia farm to keep down the rats, and that he lost eight per cent of his crop to rats even with Doug, he’d been forced to cart Doug off to the nearest patch of rainforest. But pythons won’t do things they don’t want to. Having spent the whole twelve years of his existence dining effortlessly on the plentiful vermin at The Coastal Coffee Company, Doug was back the next day, lying pathetically along the doorstep like a lumpy draught-stopper, with a fruit-bat-shaped bulge in his middle. He had no intention of leaving home, which left Desiree no choice.
During this extreme weather, Eric was in a nervous state just keeping his equipment, crops and orchards intact, without the Desiree-versus-Doug stand-off. All the local farmers were shocked by the minus-nine-degrees nights that froze the stone-fruit on the trees, turned the unripe strawberries and blueberries as soft and pulpy as jam, and left the mangoes and avocados as hard as cricket balls. The winds stripped the unripe nuts from their branches and fired them like bruising grapeshot against the fruit trees. Orchardists tried pumping water from the creek to spray their fruit trees overnight to keep them warm, but the record frost defeated them and next morning stalactites hung off the branches.
Eric explained that Doug was supposed to be hibernating, not roaming about the house seeking warm and motionless resting spots. ‘He wound himself around the top of the chimney for a month, clinging on for dear life. Then we had that strange sunny spell and he spent every day sunbaking on the ping-pong table on the veranda. The unbroken warm days confused him and made him think it was summer. He was shedding skin and looking frisky and suddenly next-door’s cat disappeared. Then we had those cyclonic winds, and trees blew down, and the house shook, and Doug was too nervy to sleep up in the rafters.’
A resident python wasn’t the only wildlife specimen feeling out of sorts. When the weather turned windy and wet, the cane toads came out of hibernation too soon, the house spiders arrived unheralded in the bathrooms, and the huntsmen began hunting all across the ceilings. In the middle of winter, the water dragons appeared, bemused, out of the shrubbery, glanced quickly around and vanished again. Meanwhile, the male brush turkeys had long since built their nesting mounds only to have them and the unhatched eggs swept away in the latest deluge. Always flustered, the brush turkeys were frenetic with worry.
The natural environment was behaving unseasonably and erratically. Bull sharks started entering our muddy rivers and travelling upstream, bumping against boats and scaring fishermen and kayakers. Early-season fleas climbed our trouser legs, and the region’s primary-school scalps began teeming with nits at least one term too early. Houses reeked of flea bombs and LiceBlaster. In the meantime, as Eric showed me, Doug Anthony was curled up on top of the TV guide, his skin patterns blurry and sallow, the tip of his tail flopping over half the screen, looking sorry for himself.
‘Doug is very sensitive. He can taste the changes in the weather with his tongue,’ Eric said. ‘And he’s not happy.’ Neither was Eric. This was clear from his fidgety demeanour. He was fond of Doug, what with his antecedents and pest-disposal habits, but he was missing Desiree. The climate of Eric’s existence was definitely changeable.
‘How’s life?’ I ventured, sipping one of Eric’s quadruple-strength Arabica espressos, whose kick almost equals a single shot anywhere else. We were sitting on the steps of his roasting shed, the aroma of burnt beans soaking into our clothes and skin. Whenever I drive away from The Coastal Coffee Company I think I’ve left the handbrake on.
‘Much better,’ he answered. ‘Doug’s back up in the rafters aga
in so Desiree came home last week. I guess I can’t complain.’
But he still looked a bit edgy. After a moment, he said, ‘Desiree has laid down some new ground rules for staying with me.’
‘Ground rules?’
‘Rules on the way things have to be arranged in future. What’s it called? Chop suey? Mah jong? You know what I mean. She’s making me do things with my shoes in Chinese.’
There was another long moment while I sipped my coffee. Eventually I had a brainwave. ‘You don’t mean feng shui?’
‘That’s it. She’s always checking that my shoes aren’t facing the wall. She says shoes have to be turned facing into the room, otherwise their owner will never be free.’ He gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Even if they’re sitting in the cupboard. And I’ve got to chuck out all my old boots from the garage. She hates the garage. She says it represents emotions from the past. And here’s me thinking it represented a roof over the ute.’
Those of us who know Eric were anticipating something like this. Eric is a conservative farmer. Desiree teaches Life Alignment. Eric grows difficult produce often best suited to other regions. Desiree balances negative energies for a living. If you’re suffering from an enemy’s curses or geopathic stress, she’s your woman.
‘She says I should always see my feet as indicators of where they can take me,’ Eric said.
‘Makes sense,’ I said.
‘Best foot forward and all that,’ said Eric.
‘Absolutely.’
Eric was staring off across the macadamia fields towards the white-roofed cottage of the painter of frangipanis and dolphins. He blinked then, as if to switch his flow of thought, and went on, his voice low. ‘Desiree has a thing about keys, too. If you want a new life you have to throw away the keys you no longer use or the ones associated with anyone else. They have to be kept in descending order of size. One short key and one long key next to each other on your key ring means your life will be like a roller-coaster. Keys facing different ways will keep you always heading in different ways, too.’